After Effects
by savingophelia
Summary: After the fall of Mount Weather, Clarke meets a ghost in the forest. Or maybe she's the one fading. (That was the past, but this was the beginning.) / Clexa three-shot.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N ~** My shot at the clexa reunion which we all know is coming. (Shut up.) I've been feeling the need to write a reunion ever since 2x15 (otherwise known as The Irrepairable Breaking Of My Heart) and although DM's taking up most of my time, listening to Jamie Brown's song Home To Me kind of pushed me over the edge. This is a three shot and I probably won't expand it further than that. Enjoy at your own risk.

 **After Effects**

[ **0.33** ]

Stale rain dripped steadily from the boughs of the trees, the leaves, the leftovers' of the mornings' storm. Clarke's breath froze in her lungs and scraped her throat as it left her. Her fingers were shaking, and the filmy skins of the nuts she'd stockpiled earlier had worked their painful way under her fingernails, but that didn't matter. She had food enough for the next few days. Her knife hung, cold and secure, at her belt. That was all that mattered. She had no idea how long she'd been alone. Moments bled together, no span to time, and the moss-grown days of walking and hunting, foraging and sleeping drifted into one another, an unintelligble mass of blisters and broken thoughts. After a while, solitude shatters itself and becomes a friend.

Clarke hopped down from the tangle of tree roots she'd scouted from, feeling the damp soil crumble under her worn boots. She could have sworn she'd heard something. Well - something more. Every second of her existence was filled with the drip of rain or the crawl of animals on the crunch of leaves, the wind whistling through whispering branches, rivers running over clicking crickets. The endless symphony of the wild. She wondered if she even knew how to speak anymore. Useless practises died hard. Like everything that was good enough to know better.

 _Snap_.

Clarke became ice. Her fingers inched for her knife. Her blood jolted alert in her veins. And she turned around, quiet as possible. The yellow eyes of the wolf met hers with a vicious understanding. She gripped the knife until the ridges of the hilt sunk impressions into the grime of her palm. If she stayed still for long enough it'd leave her alone. If it thought she was a threat she'd have to kill it. That was all she ever did, after all. She could see the animals' thought process. She could see herself through its mind. Just another beast. Feral.

A growl ripped from its throat and Clarke knew what was going to happen. Its paws tore through the soil, bounding towards her as her instinct took charge of her adrenaline, and she took up her defensive stance, teeth bared. She swerved sideways, steadying herself on a tree trunk as wolf ran at her, spinning furiously as it realized she was out of its path. Clarke lunged before it could move, so she was behind it. It turned around the instant before her knife would have lashed out. It was staring right at her, backed up into an oak. Her blood froze as her skin burned, and she could feel her pulse dizzyingly in her fingertips. The wolf flashed a glimpse of yellowed teeth at her, growling as it stalked foreward. She threw herself to the side, scrabbling back upright, and it pounced on the spot where she'd stood moments before. A grunt ripped from her throat as Clarke zig zagged around trees, throwing her body down into the dirt to avoid the brindled grey's claws. She rolled onto her back, and that was when she realized her knife had been lost in her feeble flee. Her cold hands froze on the empty space where her knife should have been. Grey fur rippled in the chilled breeze as the wolf padded over to her. She scrambled backwards, half-heartedly. _So this is it then_. Yellow eyes advanced. She never could have imagined this was how it finished. Distantly, as if from far away, the voice of a poltergiest wormed into the forefront of her oddly calm mind. _Death is not the end_. Clarke forced her eyes to stay open as the wolfs lips drew back from rows of lethal teeth, almost snarling.

Then the blood rained hot on her face and she couldn't piece it together.

Not until she caught the glint of silvery-sharp metal protruding from the things' throat. Scarlet dribbled down from the blade, sticking in his fur. The wolf gave a small whine, but the bright danger behind those uncanny eyes was all but out. Clarke blinked her panic away, staring around and up, across the stretch of woodland, and her chest froze over and her insides collapsed at the prescence of the ghost.

The ghost was beautiful and Clarke wanted to burrow down into the earth beneath her, to bequeath herself to the dirt. The trigedakru surrounding Clarke's only breathing demon seemed uncertainly conflicted, but the ghost murmured something in the language Clarke never mastered without looking away from her, and they retreated, out of sight, commanded by the haunted look in the ghost's eyes.

The ghost stepped tremulously forewards, eyes blasted wide open, and Clarke's entire body ached with reality. Her gaze scoured her. They had become each others' shadows. She'd thought her life was worth saving. "Why?" Clarke's voice sounded harsh and unfamiliar in her ears, stripped back and scraped raw. Wild. Or maybe she'd just forgotten what it sounded like.

Lexa glanced down at the spread of moss under her feet, and the hesitation in her lips and the curl of her fingers shot straight to the cold dark place Clarke's heart had once been. "Habit, I suppose."

She had no idea what she was supposed to do now. She wanted to run at her, knock her to the ground and then tear off in the opposite direction, because she could never really hurt Lexa. She wanted to be able to. She wanted to go to her and remember the smell of her hair, to hide inside her and never come out. She wanted her to be dead. She wanted her to be immortal. She wanted to collapse and stay in the soil forever.

And Clarke felt something like the tug of a stitch where she should have felt the closing of a book, and she wondered if maybe it had been Lexa she'd been searching for all along.

She couldn't be still any longer or she'd never move again. Clarke threw herself foreward, agonizingly forcing herself not to look at the woman she'd never quite shaken off, burying her fingers in the russet ruin of the wolf's throat, digging through redundent tendons and the sticky stains smeared through his fur until her shaking fingers could grip the soaked blade, yanking it out and hurling it through the trees towards her with all the force she could muster. Her breathing was taking on its own course, lungs churning oxygen for something to focus on, each drag of earth-scented air scraping the cold inside of her throat.

Then she caught sight of her hands, fingers coated crimson, so impossibly bright against her filthy skin, red, red, red blood that had once flowed through the veins of something pure and something alive, clinging to her hands, branding her. _The things we have to do to survive don't define us. They do now._ Wolf blood was drying on her face, and still oozing sluggishly from the dead things' neck. _I'm not going in._ She had to get it off, god, she had to get it _off._ Clarke's gaze burned into it. _May we meet again_. She was rubbing her hands, but it was just getting worse, getting everywhere, like when children painted with their hands. She'd killed children who had done that. She was scraping her hands on her clothes, staining, on the ground, gathering earth. _May we meet again._ She had to get it off.

"Clarke, Clarke," She hadn't realized Lexa was hurrying towards her until she was kneeling beside her in the dirt, and her eyes, her beautiful, beautiful eyes, lost and hurt and everything else under the sun were searching for Clarke's. Her hands found Clarke's, forcefully stilling her crazed crusade to cleanliness. Clarke's skin was electrified, what was left of her heart crumbling away like ash in the wind at the contact, her bones becoming steel. "Clarke, stop,"

Clarke met her gaze because she couldn't not anymore. She wanted to wrench her hands away, tear away from Lexa, to scream and rage and leave as much as she wanted to grip her wrists and grip her tight and not let go. She wanted the dead person she used to be back. She might have known what to do. But Lexa's eyes were like some tempestuous ocean, and so damn readable. There is no stopping for me now. It might have been a minute, or it might have been a millenium that they stayed like that. Clarke wasn't good at time anymore.

But then Lexa stood up and turned away, wiping the blood from her knife on the cloth of her sleeve. Clarke watched her still figure, but she didn't turn back. She waited a moment, and then she was walking away, thick hair rippling in the breeze, like she'd done before, when they were supposed to be beside each other, when they were so close to fixing each other. Lexa was halfway across the leafy clearing when she stopped and Clarke heard her sigh with a sharp clarity. "Well?" She heard the tremour beneath the outward strength of her voice. "Are you coming?"

 _I can't_. Clarke rose to her feet, blood and dirt clinging to her. _No_. But her feet were already closing the distance. When they were side by side, Clarke focused on the silver cloud of her breath instead of the familiar heart beating in the heda beside her. She wasn't sure where the rest of the hunting party had gone, but it wasn't here. She wasn't sure where they were going, even though she'd spent however long it had been learning the land as well as any grounder. And she wasn't sure what was happening, either.

But somewhere along the line, when she was drowning in the roar of the silence, Clarke found her voice. "You didn't go to Polis,"

"No," Lexa was looking softly, determinedly ahead. The flutter of her eyelashes was quietly destroying her. For a second Clarke thought she was going to say something else, but she was wrong.

After infinity the village rose up around them, wood and smoke and memories, and she nearly turned away, just left. Instead, she followed Lexa's set path. She'd had no idea she was so close to Ton DC. But she tried to stay away from all things human. Either everybody was out on the hunt, or just gone; she only picked up on a handful of grounders going about their business. None stared, none protested; deterred by the warning writ through Lexa's stance. Or maybe they didn't recognize Clarke; Clarke barely recognized civilization. _Like a dream._ Clarke steeled herself, mouth grimly set, following Lexa down to the room where she'd once decided to let countless people burn. The effect was dizzying, even as she followed the commander into a foreign room, some kind of storage compartment. So disorientating that she just stood there, absorbing the past and shaking it off.

Which was why it took so long for her to realize what Lexa was doing, going around the hall, picking up various items, gathering them with a quietly stormy efficiency. Then her face was opposite hers, and she was loading the things into Clarke's arms. Clarke frowned. Hard bread, waterskins, throwing knives. This time it was her forcing Lexa to just fucking look at her. Clarke studied her and wondered how they got here. "You're making me leave?" Her throat ached from speaking again. This whole thing was so surreal. Like a fantasy. Like a hallucenation. Like a story someone else was telling her. (It was just coincidence that it was also the only real thing she'd felt in months.)

Lexa blinked reproachfully. "I assumed you didn't want to stay."

 _But you didn't just leave me there_. The ghost voice in her mind swam back into focus. _You couldn't leave me to die. That was weakness_. And then everything came crashing onto her, and her nails bit deep into her bloody palms, and her insides collapsed. _I thought love was weakness_. Clarke took a step foreward, one step closer, but she couldn't bring herself to actualize the idea of just grabbing Lexa and holding her tight, not yet. She didn't have the strength. The force in her muscles and her marrow drained away. _All this time I've been alone_. Her mouth was dry with words she hadn't verbalized, throat tight around a tangled ball of unspoken half-sounds, heart pulsing with everything else. She tried to loose herself in the dark green shine of Lexa's eyes. And just like that, like blood, it was welling up and spilling out of her. "I defeated the mountain," Clarke wasn't crazy. Her voice had never sounded like that before.

"Yes." Lexa breathed, with a strange kind of knowledge.

"I defeated the mountain," She repeated, if only to remind herself. Her teeth tore at the inside of her mouth to deterr the tears that was stupidly filling the empty spaces in her. "I killed them all," She shook her head. "I shot Dante Wallace, and then I killed them all." The way Lexa was looking at her made her want to cry even more. "I did it, Lexa," her voice had dropped. She probably sounded insane. She probably was. She existed alone now. Even the reapers were better off. "I pulled the lever,"

Lexa's stare was hard and understanding, but her voice was a feeble attempt. _At what_? " _Jus drein jus_ -"

"No." Clarke shook her head again. "No. I took the blood of the guilty. But there were people in that mountain who helped me. Saved my friends' lives. There were kids there, Lexa. _Children_. And I killed them." Lexa opened her mouth to say something, but Clarke couldn't stop herself. Because it had all been inside her for too long. She'd been alone with it all for so long it had gotten into her system, coursed through her veins, poisoned her. And now, here she was, the one person who knew, the one person who she wanted to tell the most. "I saved my people, I got everything I wanted. And then I left them, and I've been living like - like an animal ever since," her voice was rising. "Not because I'm trying to repent, because I can't ever do that, but because I just - I can't be around those people anymore!" _And then you show up_. ( _And the sight of you regrows my heart just so you can break it with every sweep of your eyelashes_.)

Lexa studied her for a moment. "I understand."

"I know," Clarke murmured. _You're the only one who ever can._


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N ~** Thank you to everyone reading and putting up with my stupid emotional headcanons. We gotta share the feels; I can't handle the wait for season three and it's barely begun. (Yes, I did write this entire thing with Home To Me on repeat, what's your point?)

 **After Effects**

[ 0.66 ]

The greenery of the forest was spinning, assaulting her senses, trying to envelope her again. Clarke gripped one of the knives Lexa had given her as if it was her ticket out of the state she'd worked herself into. Everything Lexa had said, done, every twitch of her bone was resounding through Clarke's mind, crashing through her veins, giving her a headache. All this time. She'd become adept at cutting off the thoughts she couldn't afford to focus on. But Lexa, _Lexa_. Lexa was everything unknown. Lexa was her unfinished business. Everyone back at Jaha would be okay. They'd make things work. She knew that. And she couldn't let herself worry about them. But Lexa had gotten into her bloodstream. No matter how brutally, how hard she forced herself to think otherwise, she was just like a reaper; just looking for her next fix. (Because after the pain became familiar enough to think around, she realized Lexa wouldn't be okay.)

And here she was, walking away.

The hardest part was that she knew now. She knew where Ton DC was, and from that she could always gather where the other villages were, where Lexa was, where Camp Jaha was. Waiting.

"Clarke," Clarke spun on her heels. Lexa had a waterskin hanging loosely from her hand, and her eyes were wide, stonily hard, feather soft, reluctant and desperate and hopeful and a little bit terrified. It all hurtled right into the core of her half-hollow heart. Because she was feeling that feeling again. _What will you do, when it's over?_ The one that had been kindling from ordinary ash when it had been abandoned. It had drawn from its own strength to feed, turned on itself, tried to live and to stamp itself out. But it was acknowledging itself again now. Because it was always there, the nearly dead thing in her chest. Because she did love Lexa, she hated that she did, she loved it and she hated her too. _I have no idea._ But she did have an idea. It was so natural she didn't have to acknowledge it. She thought everything would fall into place after she got her friends back. She thought, somewhere along the line, she could just go home to Lexa and say, _I'm ready_ , and that would be it.

She didn't have a home anymore.

Not except the dilapidated one waiting in Lexa's heart.

She had to respect that now. And suddenly Clarke could feel the strain draining out the pores of her skin like sweat or blood. Beginning to detach from her. _Please say I can_ \- "Stay."

Clarke watched her breath freeze for a moment in the air and join the breeze that toyed with Lexa's hair. Then she lost all her restrait, for a second, and she took two slow steps, before she was running a reply. Lexa had taken a few steps towards her when she collided with her, fiercely, throwing her arms around Lexa's neck and burying her face in her hair and clutching her too tight. Her heart collapsed in relief. She wasn't sure she was ever going to let go. She could feel Lexa's heart beating against hers. And then Lexa's arms were tentatively holding her, around her back, and Clarke felt so real, so unfamiliarly solid and human. It might have been a thousand years later, when they let go, and she never would have known. It was in a comforting sort of silence they turned back, together.

"You left me." Clarke stated, mostly to herself. Somehow she had become numb to the words - just the words. Once you said, thought the sounds enough times, they grew blunt. Anesthesia by repitition. As they made their way through the woods, she could almost feel the jagged edges of the person she used to be melting back into her.

"Yes." Lexa said.

"You thought I was dead." That thought was bizarre, evasive, unreal. And it had probably been for the better.

"Yes." Lexa said again, and at that Clarke heard the slightest tremour beneath the outward rocky strength she'd fortified her voice with.

"You don't have to apologize." _I would have done the same. I did worse instead._

"I wasn't about to." Lexa told her. Clarke could only imagine what level of hero she was to her people now. "There's a spring nearby. I'm going to get a drink." The normality of that sentence seemed so absurd she could have laughed.

The sun had risen high and fierce, and its light fluttered through the leaves in shifting patterns, swirling over the forest, and over Lexa. Oddly, Clarke was recalling something about earth history, how people would start wars because they didn't think the same, how they shot and killed people who prayed the same way in different churches and wondered how anybody could be so blind. Earth was their church, their sunlight temple. Even if Clarke wasn't sure how to believe. She went beside Lexa after the stream, watching her follow it back to the source. The way the trigedakru knew their land was always incredible to her, but now she thought she was almost on the same level. (And a year ago she never thought she'd leave space.)

The spring was dribbling from beneath a thick wall of rock, feeding a pool of mud sunk into the forest floor, and pine needles were falling from above, disturbed by birds. Lexa knelt to fill her waterskin and Clarke sat on one of the rocks by the riverbank, watching the clear sluggish water drift away. "You came back for a waterskin?" She raised eyebrow in a half-hearted attempt at normality. That had to be the most transparant excuse anyone had ever made.

Lexa turned to her. "Yes," She hesitated a moment, watching the water flow over dirt and stone, capping the waterskin. And then she turned back to Clarke. "Because you don't get to make me weak and then leave."

 _You did_ , Clarke almost said; but she knew that wasn't fair. Lexa sighed quietly, coming to sit beside her. Clarke nodded. "I didn't want to."

Lexa's gaze sought hers and she had to relent. "Neither did I."

Clarke felt a sad smile inching across her face. _Weak_. When you shut a dog in a room, it whimpered all night because it thought you didn't love it anymore, but the whole time Clarke had been alone she could feel Lexa out there somewhere, loving her, and that was so much worse. Like white noise in the back of her mind, it was always there, the niggling realization that after she freed her people, Lexa would probably never let herself feel anything again. "You did the right thing."

"Perhaps." Lexa allowed, eyes flickering from the stream to Clarke, lost and found.

"Hey," Clarke reached across to put her hand over Lexa's, and her skin cells sung. " _Hey_. There aren't any good guys, Lexa. Not when survival's at stake. Not - there's just people. And the choices we make. You _saved your people_." _And you didn't have to massacre children to do it_. It was funny - Clarke understood everything Lexa did, completely, and she'd come bitterly, agonizingly to accept it, but she always thought she hated her for it, a little bit. A thousand thoughts were changing today. Maybe she had.

The way Lexa's eyes sought hers was melting all her walls. "I know."

Clarke stood up, and held out her hand. "Come on."


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N ~** So I know this last little part is teeny, but it just seemed like the right place to leave it, you know? I may do different reunion stuff in the future, which would be more Lexa-centric, since this is from Clarke's perspective and as Jason said, Lexa thought she left the woman she loved to die and I want to do something with that because uuuuuurgh. But here we have the final little piece of my damn feelsy headcanon. Big hugs to everyone reading and shipping and keeping the faith. #clexaisendgame

 **After Effects**

[ _0.99_ ]

It was a few days after Lexa and found her that Clarke realized there was no need to work around the distance. That was the past, but, god, if she tried, this could be the beginning. Only a few of Lexa's generals knew she was there. Lexa had told them she was still the leader of the skaikru.

"Will you ever go back?" Lexa asked her softly, undoing her wristguards, in the dim lamplight of her quarters.

Clarke was seated at the rough-hewn table across the room, but she rose at the question, drifting to sit on the edge of Lexa's bed. "I don't know." With the guarantee of waking up to her heart beating every morning, she did have more time to think. And they were worming their way through the cracks in her guard, their voices chipping away at her defences; defences Lexa was already demolishing simply by existing. They were her family, once, her broken little warrior family. "Maybe. Someday." She sighed and the air turned to iron inside of her. But _how_? How could she ever go back to them? Her mother, who killed her father and her friends who were alive because hundreds of people, because those children weren't. She couldn't even imagine it anymore. "But it won't ever be the same."

Lexa's eyes met hers, flint crumbling away. "It never is."

Clarke made herself stand. Lexa had given her her own quarters, but it was become harder and harder to pull away from Lexa's. She was right. It wasn't the same. And it never would be. She would always have that blood on her hands. Lexa would always be the one that left. But over the past few days - and maybe she was an idiot, blinded by chance - it was becoming clear to her that didn't have to be all. Everything had its dark spots.

Some of them lasted longer than others, stained too deep to ever really scour away. Some of them left permenant marks. But the deepest scars still fade over time.

Lexa had her deep-rooted issues - hell, there were times Clarke thought Lexa was so much more messed up than she was. But when she first came into her life, Clarke was torn apart about Finn. There were times she couldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel; and Lexa had been so long in its darkness that she'd convinced herself that it was a good thing. But now she could feel Finn - the pacifist Finn, her Finn - around her, his ashes feeding the earth that held her up and the air that fueled her body, and she could remember him and be thankful for what they had. The lives of those children, of her allies, of people who had nothing to do with her gun and smoke war were never going to be returned. Never going to leave her conscience. But she could still live.

After Finn, she'd tried to fix Lexa and ended up fixing herself ( _however long that lasted_ ).

There were times Clarke lost herself in Lexa's eyes and heart and she thought there was no reason that couldn't happen again. She wanted to soothe Lexa's scars so much it hurt.

She wanted to move on with the rest of the story. ( _There was so much she wanted)_.

"Well," She was drifting toward Lexa. "I should probably..." Clarke's breath left her jaggedly. She realized that she didn't want to leave. Lexa nodded her understanding, studying for a moment before her eyes flickered back down to whatever maps she was scrutizing. But Clarke could tell she wasn't focusing. "Lexa," For the first time, Clarke wasn't thinking about anything, as she leaned in, going with the flow of the tides, to her new center of gravity.

"You said you weren't ready to be with anybody," Lexa's voice wavered defensively.

Clarke studied her, drinking in the corners and the contours of her face under the shift of twilight shadow, and when she spoke she kept her voice strong, because she had never been so sure of anything before. " _You're not anybody_."

Her fingers burrowed deeper in the dark curls around Lexa's neck, relishing in the warmth and the jump of her pulse, of the certain life crackling through her veins, while her gaze burrowed deeper into her wide, stormy eyes, assuring her. The infinity between that moment, and the moment Clarke started kissing her was a soothing battle. And then her eyelids fell and her skin woke up and her heart came home; Lexa's lips were soft and warm and somehow better than their memory, and something rich and real stirred in her stomach as her mouth worked, softly, deeply against hers.

(The past was dead, a paper-thin scar, a ghost, faintly eternal in the wind.) This was her turning page.


End file.
